The No Asshole Rule is a very well known criteria for building a healthy workplace. If you've worked in a newer company (say, incorporated within the last 8 years) you probably saw this or something much like it in the company guidelines or orientation. What you may not have seen were the principles.
Someone is an asshole if:
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- After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
- Does the person target people who are less powerful than them?
If so, they are an asshole and should be gotten rid of.
And if we all did this, the tech industry would be a much happier place. It's a nice principle.
The problem is that the definition of 'asshole' is an entirely local one, determined by the office culture. This has several failure-modes.
Anyone who doesn't agree with the team-leader/boss is an asshole.
Quite a perversion of the intent of the rule, as this definitely harms those less powerful than the oppressor, but this indeed happens. Dealing with it requires a higher order of power to come down on the person. Which doesn't happen if the person is the owner/CEO. Employees take this into their own hands by working somewhere else for someone who probably isn't an asshole.
All dissent to power must be politely phrased and meekly accepting of rejection.
In my professional opinion, sir, I believe the cost-model presented here is overly optimistic in several ways.
I have every confidence in it.
Yes sir.
The thinking here is that reasoned people talk to each other in reasoned ways, and raised voices or interruptions are a key sign of an unreasonable person. Your opinion was tried, and adjudged lacking; lose gracefully.
In my professional opinion, sir, I believe the cost-model presented here is overly optimistic in several ways.
I have every confidence in it.
The premise you've built this on doesn't take into account the ongoing costs for N. Which throws off the whole model.
Mr. Anderson, I don't appreciate your tone.
It's a form of tone policing.
All dissent between team-mates must be polite, reasoned, and accountable to everyone's feelings.
Sounds great. Until you get a tone cop in the mix who uses the asshole-rule as a club to oppress anyone who disagrees with them.
I'm pretty sure this new routing method introduces at least 10% more latency to that API path. If not more.
I worked on that for a week. I'm feeling very intimidated right now.
ðŸ˜. Sorry, I'm just saying that there are some edge cases we need to explore before we merge it.
😟
Okay, let's merge it into Integration and run the performance suite on it.
This is a classic bit of office-politics judo. Because no one wants to be seen as an asshole, if you can make other people feel like one they're more likely to cave on contentious topics.
Which sucks big-time for people who actually have problems with something. Are they a political creature, or are they owning their pain?
The No Asshole Rule is a great principle in the abstract, but it took the original author 224 pages to communicate the whole thing in the way he intended it. That's 223.5 pages longer than most people have the attention-span for, especially in workplace orientations, and are therefore not going to be clued into the nuances. It is inevitable that a 'no asshole rule' enshrined in a corporate code-of-conduct is going to be defined organically through the culture of the workplace and not by any statement of principles.
That statement of principles may exist, but the operational definition will be defined by the daily actions of everyone in that workplace. It is going to take people at the top using the disciplinary hammer to course-correct people into following the listed principles, or it isn't going to work. And that hammer itself may include any and all of the biases I lined out above.
Like any code of conduct, the or else needs to be defined, and follow-through demonstrated, in order for people to give it appropriate attention. Vague statements of principles like no assholes allowed or be excellent to each other, are not enforceable codes as there is no way to objectively define them without acres of legalese.